Author's Notes: This was inspired by a one-shot I wrote a while ago, entitled "Something in the Darkness". Like that, it includes underage sex-related things (Harry is 15), age disparity, and general mindfuckery (in several senses of the word). Unlike that, it will have multiple chapters.
Enjoy!
Something in the darkness pulled me deeper.
Something in the madness eased my mind.
Was I awake or was I dreaming?
~Blackmore's Night
)O(
The longer Harry thought about the article in the Daily Prophet about the mass breakout from Azkaban, the sicker he felt.
There were plenty of excellent reasons that that article should make him sick. It made him sick that the Ministry was blaming it on Sirius. It made him sick that the Prophet still refused to acknowledge what was becoming ever more clear: Voldemort was on the rise again, and he was building himself an army. And it made him sick that people who had done the sort of things that the people in that article had were loose in the world.
It was, surely, only because of how very, very sick the whole matter made him that Harry couldn't get his mind off of it for the rest of the day.
He had picked up Hermione's copy of the Daily Prophet at breakfast and casually folded the page containing the pictures from the Azkaban breakout into his pocket. Hermione had caught his eye when he did it, but he just shrugged, indicating without actually saying so that he intended to reread the article when he had time. A perfectly good reason to take a page out of the paper, he thought. Aunt Petunia had done it all the time whenever there was some gossipy column about her favourite film star that she wanted to pour over later.
Of course, reading about a film star was a bit different from reading about prisoners who had escaped Azkaban.
The piece of paper felt heavy in his pocket all day – pressing against his leg as he sat in class, rustling so quietly that only he could hear it while he walked, innocuous, but always present.
By the time night came and Harry had a chance to be alone with the paper at last, his mind was so focussed on it that any action not directly related to the paper was becoming difficult.
He drew the curtains around his bed that night and sat back against the pillow, clutching the paper in his slightly sweaty, slightly shaky hands.
Harry tried to read the article. He hadn't been able to take it in properly last time, and he ought to know what the Ministry and the Prophet were saying about the breakout, however wrong their information was likely to be. He tried to soak up what little information it was giving him like he had intended to do all day.
But he couldn't focus. His eyes kept being drawn away from the article, up to the faces of the twelve escaped Death Eaters.
Dolohov. Mulciber. Rookwood. Travers. Lestrange…
He stopped.
Bellatrix Lestrange stared out of the paper at him from beneath her heavily hooded eyelids, and a smirk played about her lips.
A shiver ran through Harry's body, an unpleasantly intense sort of shiver that jolted him right to his core. What a horrifying, disgusting woman she was. He could hear in her mind as clearly as if Bartemius Crouch was standing right next to him, the crime that Bellatrix Lestrange had been convicted for, and just thinking about it made him feel sick to his stomach.
Torturing Neville's parents until they went insane. Even Voldemort wouldn't have done that, Harry thought. Even he would have had the good decency to kill them, not leave them alive and broken in a wing of St. Mungo's…
Harry became aware that he was gripping the paper so tightly that his fingernails had dug through it, and he put it down.
Surely, he thought, surely this would be enough for the Ministry. Surely they would be able to see now what a horrible mistake they had been making with all their insistences that Voldemort was dead and he had not risen again.
They have to know. They have to.
He tossed the paper to the foot of his bed and lay down, closing his eyes. For a moment, he thought guiltily about his Occlumency lessons and wondered if he should at least try to clear his mind before he went to sleep. He pushed the thought away – after all, how could he possibly be expected not to think about it? Surely the whole school would be thinking about it while they tried to sleep – why wouldn't he?
Harry pressed his palms over his eyes and forced his body to relax back onto the pillow. He tried half-heartedly to turn his thoughts to the DA and what new things he should be teaching now that the Death Eaters had escaped from Azkaban. He had already seen sharp improvement in most of the members since the meetings had started – surely this would give them eve more incentive, even more reason to try their very hardest and be their very best at all the things that he taught them. The threat was more immediate than ever now, even more so for those members who knew what the Death Eaters who had escaped were capable of…
Like Neville.
And thoughts of Bellatrix came swimming back into Harry's mind again. Harry could so clearly remember how she had looked at her trial – so arrogantly proud of the atrocities that she had committed in the Dark Lord's name. There had been three men with her, Harry remembered – Barty Crouch Jr. had been one of them and there had been two others as well. But they all paled in comparison to Bellatrix in Harry's mind. They had not bragged about their faith to the Dark Lord, as she had. They had remained quiet during the trial, perhaps nursing just the smallest scraps of regret, but she had stood and called herself faithful.
And she was a woman.
Harry knew perfectly well that femininity didn't mean anything about how evil a person could be. Look at Umbridge, he thought viciously, anger rising in his throat. Look at Umbridge with her flowers and kittens and those hateful, garish pink cardigans. A twinge ran through the back of Harry's hand where she had had him carve I must not tell lies all those times. Those kittens and cardigans didn't for a moment make her any less evil. In fact, Harry thought, both for Umbridge and for Bellatrix, such things made them more hateful, more horrible.
The fact that they masked their evil behind pink and kittens made them worse…
But Bellatrix didn't have pink cardigans or kitten plates. She wasn't hiding behind things like that. But she still had a façade that hid what she was like.
Her looks.
Harry was immediately disgusted with himself for even having such thoughts about her. He should know that her looks had nothing to do with her morals. And he shouldn't be thinking of her as attractive in any case.
I don't!
He was being objective when he said that she was attractive, that was all. She wasn't attractive to him specifically. But she had the right sort of body and the right sort of face to be attractive by any normal standards of beauty. It wasn't anything more than that. Some people might find her attractive enough that it would distract them from the sort of person she really was.
But not Harry. He knew that she was evil.
Satisfied with himself, he closed his eyes and curled up against the pillow, and allowed ideas about the DA to fill his mind again. He had said that he was going to start teaching them more complicated things soon – maybe even Patronuses.
He wondered vaguely what people would think about when they conjured their Patronuses. Would Ron think about how he had made it onto the Quidditch team? Would Hermione think about getting top marks on all her exams? Would Cho think about kissing him under the mistletoe?
He certainly hoped she would. But that probably wasn't really the happiest memory of her life – maybe not even close. But if Harry had to guess – if he had been Cho – he would say that the happiest moment would probably be either kissing him, or going to the Yule Ball with Cedric.
Probably Cedric, said a soft, sullen voice in the back of his mind.
But I'm alive and Cedric's dead, he thought. And maybe that would be enough to tip things in his favour. He was alive and Cedric was dead and thinking about Cedric might set Cho off crying again…
A small smile curved his lips. He imagined putting his arms comfortingly around her and letting her sob into his shoulder – probably a stupid fantasy, but it would be ever so pleasant…